1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to transcription of spoken source material. More particularly the invention is directed to a method and system for rapid transcription.
2. Technical Background
Transcription is the rendering of the spoken word into written form. While this process goes back to the earliest examples of written poetry and narrative, this discussion will focus on the modern practice of transcription in the various disciplines that have need of it.
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph for the purpose of recording and reproducing the human voice, using a tinfoil-covered cylinder, in 1877. When Edison listed ten uses for his invention, the top item was “Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.” Prior to this, a reporter would have to rely on contemporary notes, and the business world on secretaries trained to take shorthand and type up the notes later. Edison's invention created the possibility that something said in one location could later be transcribed elsewhere, with the additional benefit of repeated listening for greater accuracy. Since then, advances in the field of transcription have been closely tied to the development of recording technology.
By the 1930's, machines specifically designed for dictation and playback had become ubiquitous in American offices. Gradually cylinder-based machines gave way to tape, but until the 1990's the practice of transcription still required the physical delivery of recorded media from the location of recording to the location of transcription.
In the early 1990's, practitioners began to recognize and make use of the potential of the Internet and email in the practice of transcription. Whereas previously a transcript needed to be printed and delivered to a client, Internet email made it possible to simply attach a document in electronic form to an email message. Additionally, as tape recordings began to be replaced by digital media and businesses became more sophisticated in their use of the Internet, recordings destined for transcription could be uploaded to a secure web site and then downloaded by the transcriber.
In spite of these technological advances that have greatly eased the receipt and delivery of transcription materials, transcription of speech remains a cumbersome process that is of limited utility to clients for at least two reasons. The first reason is the amount of time required to transcribe speech into written form; the second has to do with the ability of clients to coordinate the original speech with the completed transcripts.
Transcription relies on the abilities of a trained professional to listen carefully, understand what is being said, and accurately transfer the content and nuance to the written page. To do this well requires a great deal of time. Digital recording and electronic communication have accelerated the transmission of recordings and delivery of transcripts, but a skilled transcriber still requires at least several hours to transcribe one hour of recorded speech. In this era of instant communication and an ever-accelerating need for information and materials, even this amount of time has begun to seem a roadblock to timely business interactions.
The second difficulty referred to above has to do with the difficulty of reconciling a written transcription with its recorded source. For example, a documentary filmmaker may shoot twelve rolls of interviews and have them transcribed in order to find the most useful footage. Even though the transcripts contain time-coding that is synchronized with the recordings, it can still be a cumbersome, time-consuming task for the filmmaker to go back and locate the desired footage based on the written transcript. Often, this sort of project involves many hours of footage arriving from different sources in various locations, thus compounding the problem.
Accordingly, there exists a great need in the art to reduce or eliminate the time inefficiencies imposed on clients by the labor-intensive nature of the conventional transcription process and the difficulty of reconciling the transcript with the source.